Recent reviews by sallachim

Sadly, this game isn't really worth your attention.

But let's start with the good stuff.

Graphics are really nice. While levels are mostly static, the background pictures rewards that fact with nice eye candy. Friendly and player characters also have a nice design - which can't be said about 2 colored enemies. These however usually either move around too fast, or die too soon to admire them.

Music is distinct and helps immerse the player in the world. That's all it does however.

Lore is quite decent as well, told either in comments to the story, spoken by characters in very neat waiting room between missions, and more thoroughly explained in written notes or descriptions we can unlock. Caveat is - the unlock uses the same currency as character upgrades, meaning most players will optimise their unlock order so that the lore exposition is dead last, making it a very weird decision to make by the devs...

Interestingly, the focus on masks and the map I unlocked at the end of the game remind me a lot of Bionicle, which admittedly is pretty cool. These ideas aren't really explored however, so it's just an observation of mine rather than a point for or against the game.

Now, for the bad stuff.

The main problem the game has is that the gameplay is tragically mediocre, shallow and in result - boring. For most of the time we stand in one spot, aim at opponents rushing us from 4 main directions (but generally from all directions) and use one special power chosen from several available. Sure, the game has opponents with differing attack patterns which you can defend yourself against and counter in one way or another, while juggling the entire horde rushing us, but the challenge isn't really fun. The player simply can't do enough things to have fun.

Alternative mode (fly mode) allows us to fly around in 2D area with only other difference being that we also get a dash skill, separate from special powers. This finally approaches other games where you can run around and at least kite enemies - but the mode is brought even lower by extremely badly placed camera. Our field of view is awful, and unadjustable.

Ok, the player can do very little. However, there's more. More enemies at the end of each wave that is. When enemies spawn, their purpose is simply to overwhelm the player. And throughout the entire playthrough, you will inevitably get drowned in enemies. No matter how skilled you are or if you grind up a bit of currency in alternate infinite challenge mode or which upgrades you chose, you will always get overwhelmed eventually. Not fun.
The only time that I really managed to perfectly defend myself was past the end of the game, when I unlocked all upgrades and best gear, and even then you need to choose where and when to shoot carefully. Still, by then I was obviously done with the game. That's just way too late.

Progression is also very slow. Since we often get overwhelmed, our point multiplier often gets reset, meaning that we stay poor for much longer. But even high scores don't bring much money, meaning that with 42 levels in first part of the story, from the very beginning to the final boss, we can gen an upgrade maybe every 2nd level at best. So not only do we get stronger slowly, the bad level design makes us feel even worse with interrupting our multipliers not by our own fault. And the upgrades all give +10% to singular stat on every step, so they're not even really felt or visible until we get at least 3 of them, aside from select few.

Story is very basic. Not bad on its own but considering other faults of the game it doesn't help.

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All in all, the game is shallow and not fun to play. Any kind of skill, strategy or even plain grinding are ineffective in face of badly designed difficulty curve. Progression moves at snail's pace and is at odds with unlocking other interesting stuff the game has to offer. And whatever good stuff the game has to offer, it's just not enough to outweigh the negatives...
Solid 2/5 game.
So yeah, just don't. Don't.

In gaming, the gameplay is king, and this game certainly is part of the royal family.

Something can be said about realistic, but functional graphics that don't distract the player from seeing what they want and need to see to know the situation.
Somthing can be said about low key banger soundtrack.
Something can be said about the story happening in the background, painting the world outside of the arena as more rotten and chaotic than we could have assumed, and corporations so dystopian in their messaging that it becomes an entertainment of its own.

But frankly, none of the above matters when faced with what you will play this game for - the gameplay.

So in this game, you get 3 main classes that can be immensely customized with special abilities, weapons, and consumables into so many variants that you are certain to find something that fits what you want.
You want to be a tank running around with a hammer and bashing through walls? A mobile sniper? An invisible swordsman? Or maybe enter infinite teammate revival loop with 3 medics on your team? Nearly all options are valid, limited only by your skill in utilising them.

Multiple game modes that feel different are available - which makes it that your game sense and tactics are as valuable as your ability to aim properly and get kills. Vertical gameplay is the basis of the entire game, and maps are designed to reflect that. Maps - of which there are couple, and more are on their way. Destructible environment along with some small options for environment creation further increase the amount of stuff you can do.

The gameplay tempo is fast, but not as fast as what I remember from Call of Duty multiplayer fast. The huge size of maps does contribute to that.

As for F2P stuff - game is completely free to play at this moment. All the things you can buy for money are cosmetics, which you'll get a ton of even as a forever free to play player. No pay to win present here.

All in all, I'm having a blast playing this. And if you like FPS games, chances are you will too. I'm absolutely recommending this stellar game.

After I played the 1st game in a series and found it an enjoyable point & click game, the 2nd part is a disappointment.

First the good stuff. Game is bigger in its scope. We get some really nice new puzzles and lots of new and various environments which are a treat for eyes in this hand-drawn graphic style which I just love. I feel like there's an improvement in sound effects and background noises as well, which set the atmosphere for some locations quite well.

However with greater scope came a lack of design. Main hub location is a convoluted mess which is a pain to navigate. A single puzzle happening in 2 locations will require lots of clicks to move between them. And the worst part is that some puzzles are just very bad, including the last one required to finish the game. Even when knowing the solution I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to figure it out without a guide or hours of trial and error just clicking 70 buttons split between 2 locations.

I also found same bug in 2 different places that froze my game, but at least the game autosaves frequently, which allowed me to experiment how to overcome the bug, which turned out to be possible. Still, it's a game freezing bug, so...
And while secret hunting in previous game was quite nice and fun, here it's just annoying to some degree in every case.

So yeah, the game is now more pain than fun to play than the previous one. Not recommended.

A small point & click game with style reminiscent of older flash games.

Puzzles can be a bit absurd at times, but they aren't needlessly overcomplicated or too simple most of the time. Secrets are also very findable.

So yeah, interesting locations, hand-drawn graphics with good style and mostly no-nonsense puzzles that are very doable without a guide make it a good enough game to recommend.

Quite a boring game most of the time - bees are numerous and visible enough that the game becomes a tiresome clicker feeling more like "spot the bees" rather than"find the bees" until you are left with few bees that you can finally have some fun (or pain) looking for. And in half of the pictures bees aren't really hidden either, but rather strewn around the picture.

Game has some good stuff though.
Most artworks are really nice, however the big ones (which I liked more) suffer from getting pixelated upon too much zoom. :/
I really liked the selection of ambient background noises for the pics, they really set the atmosphere. Help button is also very neat, (literally) pointing you in the right direction rather than revealing the solution outright.

A solid P&C adventure game taking place in modern setting. It's free, takes about an hour to finish, and plays just as a good game of this genre should. While not outstanding, it's definitely worth your time.

At its base it's a really simple point & click adventure game. Ability to make your playthrough into a comic book pdf file sounds neat, but is frankly useless to 99% of people. In 2024 (7 years after the release) in my very first playthrough I encountered some bugs, which is honestly bad as well, but fortunately they weren't game breaking.

However the game has a lot of humor in it, and to be honest, just playing this game from start to finish in about 40 minutes was a dose of fun that was worth it, so in the end - recommended.
4/5 - Good game

Game has high quality drawings, cats that you can find, but are still somewhat well hidden and all in all a relaxing, but engaging gameplay of searching for cats and other stuff.

You would think that with multiple locations to scour the game would get boring and tedious. Instead, each location switches things up just so that it's standing out on its own and things stay fresh for duration of practically the entire game.
In time, you also get to acquire various help tools which are optional, so the game is about as challenging as you let it be, with no punishment for having it easy.

My only complaint is about the music, because while fitting the locations nicely, it does get old fast, but that's about it. Recommended.
Also, very suitable for kids. My niece loved it.

Don't believe the positive reviews. The game is horrible.

The best way I can describe it is this: this is a game that would be better off not being a game at all. The pastel drawn artstyle (it's nice) and wholesome message about family perfectly fit an artsy youtube video that would get millions of views, lots of recognition and popularity. Instead the developers decided to take this idea and make it into a game.

So as a game it is horrible. Why? The answer is simple - the gameplay. And the gameplay is as such. By dragging them, adjust the terrain elements to connect in a way that creates a traversible path for the old man we control. That in itself is pretty cool and interesting. Unfortunately, what follows is this - you click on a place you want the old man to go. And then you wait. The gameplay is literally watching an old man walk...
And oh man, he is sloooooow.
I decided to time this one time, and from the start of his route to the end it took the old man 45 seconds to march from one corner of my screen to the opposite one. 45 seconds of just staring into the screen.
Playing this game in the evening almost caused me to fall asleep 4 hours earlier than usual. That's how boring the experience was.

There are also some "puzzles", but they're just there to break the monotony of waiting for old man instead of being anything interesting. At times you will get literally the same puzzle twice in a row...
Also, the interaction button for puzzles - the left mouse button - is the same as for walking. So slight misclick and your old man will walk where you don't want him to and you have to turn him around.

And if you maybe delude yourself that the story is worth your attention - let me save you some time. The story, aside from old man walking is 15 slides - one per end of each level. By slide, I mean a picture showing some event from old man's past, and when put together, the pictures more or less show his life story. Which ain't that special.

To sum it up. Don't get it. And if you got it, don't play it. Save this time and do something you'll actually enjoy.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend this game. The pacing and other story presentation issues coupled with limiting gameplay on their own make this game worse than it otherwise should be. I grew to dislike the main character as the story progressed as well. Which is sad, because there is a decent amount of cool, weird and unsettling stuff in the game that I enjoyed discovering. But cool stuff in game doesn't make the game good.

The first problem is gameplay. It's a walking sim - but a painfully slow one, set in locations that are both quite big and not designed well for such exploration. Add to it how the story is presented - in form of notes (awful lot of them, it breaks immersion a little once you realise how unrealistic that is) and objects you have to find across the locations, hear out main character's thoughts on them, perhaps read the notes/watch the photos yourself, and then reread the summary of that in the journal - and the result is that the gameplay gets even more slowed down. And then sometimes you are expected to backtrack across half the location... (though sometimes it's just for collectibles. Yay, I guess...?)
On the other hands, your progress often demands some nice puzzles to solve. They are quite good. Nothing too crazy, but good. Even though the crawling speed of walking drags you down when solving most of them...

Second problem - the story. It... almost doesn't happen to you. Well, it does. We control the heroine, Norah, and she goes from the shore into the very heart of the island trying to find her husband and his fellow explorers. Unfortunately, their story is much more interesting than then one that awaits Norah. It's sort of like... the expedition team does interesting things, while interesting things happen to Norah instead. At least that's how it feels like, though she has some good moments of her own. Anyway, the feeling of her being served good stuff on silver platter almost undeservedly is strong with this one.

Third problem would be the Norah herself. As a main character, she's very outspoken. The result is very awkward in "this is very unrealistic" way. And unfortunately, Norah is very inconsistent as well. You will see her being both helpless and extremely capable (and weirdly patronising too, with being right because she's right due to the story), both brought down by the situation and extremely gleeful. Once she realises she's the heroine of this adventure, she practically revels in it, sparing but a thought or 2 to consider tragedies that happen around.
If you want to spend around 6-7 hours which it takes to finish the game, be prepared for her to flip between her dualities.

There are also some minor absurdities, like somebody putting "Sea" sign in the sea ^_^; , hearing 5 seconds of sad violin tune over a person's grave... only for it to stop and the mood is once again of mystery and exploration, or things being left out in the open on an island in the middle of Pacific without any supervision and still being fine and staying in place where they were left after over 4 months!!! .

Ok, good stuff now.
Music is nice, and appropriately unsettling at times. Main menu theme is worthy of adventure it opens. Sounds design of some puzzles is also good enough to solve them without referring to a guide.

Graphics, while at the beginning a bit jarring in the jungle, steadily become better (or maybe I just got used to them) with time. Aside from that, graphic design of stuff is also pretty good.

I complained earlier about location design from standpoint of exploration, but in terms of wonder and mystery, locations are really good. And in later chapters, unsettling and out of this world atmosphere is really cool.

All in all, if you consider getting the game, be prepared to find some nice stuff and grimace in pain at bad/annoying stuff.